Free Republic

The producer's new album, Equanimity, captures the lessons Brown has learned from his obsessive compulsive disorder diagnosis.Since entering the dance scene nearly a decade back, Spencer Brown has made his name on progressive house music that’s lush, emotive and pristinely produced. That last part is not a coincidence. Brown, 29, has always been a hyper-perfectionist, and in the last few years he’s gotten a better understanding about why. “There’s been symptoms and signs since I was a kid,” Brown tells Billboard over Zoom. “It got really intense five or six years ago, but I didn’t know what was going on.”...

Pastor John MacArthur has been preaching God’s Word for more than 50 years at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California. And while most of his teaching is sound, a couple ideas he promotes are rejected by many discerning followers of Christ. MacArthur's controversial teaching on Lordship Salvation has been addressed by numerous people over the years, myself included. The prominent pastor also espouses the disturbing theory of limited atonement, which states that Jesus did not die on the cross for everyone, but only for believers. During a Q&A three years ago, a woman asked Pastor MacArthur, “Did Jesus die...

Scientists have uncovered a mysterious network of brain connections that is linked to ... schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, addiction, OCD and anxiety — that share this underlying circuitry... Some "nodes" in the circuit have been linked to psychiatric disorders in the past, while others...are instead linked to key aspects of cognitive function, like selective attention and sensory processing... The team pinpointed brain regions where gray matter had atrophied, or shrunk, in the context of psychiatric disorders. [T]he disorders still had something in common: the tangled network of wires that runs between all these pockets of atrophy in the brain. The...

The Ukrainian government on Tuesday asked Washington to provide Kyiv with a “lend-lease” program to import natural gas from the US to ensure Ukraine has enough gas for heating this winter, Prime Minister Denis Shmyhal indicated. The idea is for the US to provide gas to Ukraine and collect payment at a later time, similar to the World War II-era lend-lease program that was revived this year to facilitate military aid to Ukraine. Via Reuters “Preparation for the most difficult winter in our history continues, and in this preparation we are looking for all possible tools to be ready for...

01 Scrupulosity, also known as Religious OCD, is a subtype of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in which people experience debilitating obsessions and compulsions about their faith. 02 Jamie's struggles with scrupulosity began in childhood. By high school, she was experiencing intense spiritual anxiety that wouldn’t be diagnosed as OCD for 11 years. 03 Jamie thought her intrusive thoughts were the voice of the Holy Spirit, which validated their contents and gave them control over her sense of morality. 04 At the age of 26, she finally received a proper diagnosis and sought help. While healing, she has been able to hang...

Joe Glickman shares why he still wears two masks and goggles when he leaves his house, even after he's been fully vaccinated.Hilarious video at source:Why vaccinated man still wears two masks and goggles

A cat sitting in a regular square (l) and the Kanizsa square illusion (r). (Smith et al., Applied Animal Behaviour Science 2021) Our feline friends certainly wow us with their cleverness - they can fetch things, open doors, navigate seemingly impossible obstacles, and even understand basic instructions (when they feel like it, anyway). At other times, they can be hilariously silly. Any cat lover is familiar with their quirks, such as seemingly endless joy at knocking things off tables, and an innate fondness for sitting in enclosed spaces. The latter can apply even if that space is just a two-dimensional...

Obsessively cleaning surfaces to get rid of COVID-19 germs is typically unnecessary “hygiene theater” and may go more harm than good by contributing to a false sense of security, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control. “CDC determined that the risk of surface transmission is low, and secondary to the primary routes of virus transmission through direct contact droplets and aerosols,” Vincent Hill, Chief of the Waterborne Disease Prevention Branch, told CNN during a CDC-sponsored telephone briefing. Thorough disinfecting surfaces is appropriate when someone with coronavirus has been in the space during the past 24 hours, Hill said. But...

“There are no solutions, only trade-offs,” Thomas Sowell famously said. When government takes action, even if that action is desperately needed, we still give something up. In the case of the Wuhan virus — with the endless mask mandates, social restrictions, and shutdowns it has ushered in — that something is our precious freedom. The American founders recognized this conundrum. According to James Madison in Federalist 37, one of the greatest challenges of the Constitutional Convention was to find the right combination, the right proportions, of government power and individual liberty. The more we ask from our government, the more...

It was a Monk revival of sorts in the first episode of Peacock’s At-Home Variety Show, hosted by Seth MacFarlane. In the episode titled “Mr. Monk Shelters In Place”, Tony Shalhoub reprised his memorable titular germophobic character Adrian Monk, whom you might guess is having a tough time during the coronavirus quarantine. At the end of the video, Shalhoub appears as himself, revealing that he and his wife, Brooke, had both tested positive for coronavirus and have since recovered. “It was a pretty rough few weeks, but we realize that so many other people have and had it a lot...

Four years ago, Molly Seidel wasn’t just the next big thing. She was the top female distance runner in the NCAA with four national titles and the Olympic Trials on the horizon. But instead of signing a splashy contract with a shoe company, Seidel was sidelined with a sacral stress fracture and watched the U.S. Olympic Track Trials from the stands at Hayward Field, where her Notre Dame teammate Dani Aragon gave her a reality check. “You look like you’re dying,” Seidel remembers her friend saying. “You need to get help.” The truth was, the fastest woman in the NCAA...

Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters escalated her rhetorical assault on President Trump over the weekend – vowing to "get him" and repeating the word "impeachment" over and over. Waters, who took heat earlier this year for urging her supporters to confront Trump administration officials in public, told a group gathered in Los Angeles that some Democratic leaders have asked her to stop talking about impeaching Trump. “There’s a difference in how some of our leadership talk about how we should handle all of this,” Water said. “They say, ‘Maxine, please don’t say impeachment anymore.'” “And when they say that, I say...

Nearly two-thirds of U.S. voters back legalizing marijuana, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday. Support for legalization hit 63 percent in the survey — the highest level of support recorded by a Quinnipiac poll. A third of American voters still oppose legalization, the poll found. Support for medical marijuana is even higher, at 93 percent. Only about 5 percent of respondents opposed it. The poll also found little support for Attorney General Jeff Sessions's decision earlier this year to rescind an Obama-era policy that paved the way for individual states to legalize marijuana without federal interference. Seventy percent...

Dear Honorable Jeff Sessions, I feel obligated to share the results of my five-year-long investigation into the medical benefits of the cannabis plant. Before I started this worldwide, in-depth investigation, I was not particularly impressed by the results of medical marijuana research, but a few years later, as I started to dedicate time with patients and scientists in various countries, I came to a different conclusion. Not only can cannabis work for a variety of conditions such as epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and pain, sometimes, it is the only thing that works. I changed my mind, and I am certain you...

People choose professions for many reasons, not the least of which is their ability, and some of which is the luck of being at the right place at the right time. [snip] With this as a background, University College of London psychologists Mark Davison and Adrian Furnham (2018) decided to dig into a question that you’ve probably had many times, especially if you follow celebrity news sites. Are all actors narcissists? [snip] Taking a look now at the results, perhaps not surprisingly, actors scored higher on the so-called “Cluster B” personality disorder traits of Narcissistic, Histrionic, and Borderline. However, their...

BOSTON (CBS) — Remember all that talk of the NFL losing viewership? Not only was CBS’ broadcast of Sunday’s AFC Championship Game between the Patriots and Jaguars the most-watched game of the season, it was the highest-rated program on television since New England’s epic comeback against the Atlanta Falcons in last year’s Super Bowl

On January 16, 1919, the 18th Amendment became law when five state legislatures (North Carolina, Utah, Nebraska, Missouri, and Wyoming) passed it. In the end, 46 of 48 states passed it, with only Connecticut and Rhode Island voting it down. The text of the amendment set into motion what became known as Prohibition: Here we are, almost 100 years later and marijuana legalization is proceeding apace, despite the efforts of the current attorney general. What lessons might we draw from Prohibition, which was repealed in 1933 with the passage of the 21st Amendment? They are many, for sure, but here...

The DUI arrests,increase in college users, youth consumption, marijuana-related hospitalizations, and increasing emergency room visits of Washington and Colorado will only be amplified in California. Voters legalized pot several years ago in Colorado and Washington State. They were promised increased tax revenue increases and better-educated children for their vote. For the love of money and claims of liberty, disasters are now unfolding in both states. Now California is embarking on likely the same disastrous path, if not worse, despite copious amounts of destructive evidence.

Bender's NFL LIVE THREAD Week 15 Thursday, Dec 14, 2017 (All times Eastern) Denver at Indianapolis 8:25 pm NFLN (& NBC) Lucas Oil Stadium Saturday, Dec 16, 2017 Chicago at Detroit 4:30 pm NFLN Ford Field L.A. Chargers at Kansas City 8:25 pm NFLN Arrowhead Stadium Sunday, Dec 17, 2017 Arizona at Washington 1:00 pm FOX FedEx Field Baltimore at Cleveland 1:00 pm CBS FirstEnergy Stadium Cincinnati at Minnesota 1:00 pm CBS U.S. Bank Stadium Green Bay at Carolina 1:00 pm FOX Bank of America Stadium Houston at Jacksonville 1:00 pm FOX EverBank Field Miami at Buffalo 1:00 pm CBS...

Earlier this month, Councilwoman Cindy Bass introduced a bill to better regulate the hundreds of “stop and go” convenience stores that operate predominantly in Philadelphia’s low-income neighborhoods. Among its stipulations, the controversial measure would prohibit any physical barrier that separates cashiers from customers at these so-called “nuisance” establishments – including protective bulletproof glass. According to Bass, these storefronts take advantage of the city’s lax restaurant liquor license provision while contributing to a variety of quality-of-life issues in low-income communities. Content to rely solely on the sale of cigarettes and alcohol, along with a bag of Doritos or two, many of...